Workshop Fun

My first ever workshop for small business owners last Wednesday night and Sunshine NoHo was great fun. I had eight wonderful entrepreneurs all excited to learn the tricks of the trade on how to get their business found online. We walked through the basics on how to do keyword research, which social media sites should get their attention first and why blogging is so important (clearly I believe in blogging…).

It was a great evening of questions and answers about how the search engines rank websites, particularly after Google’s most recent update to their algorithm (the much maligned “Panda Update“). I feel that understanding the basis for how sites get ranked is really the most important step any business owner can take if they are looking to improve lead generation and sales from their website. The basic question that the search engines ask is “How relevant is this site to the search term being used?” If your site provides lots of free, useful information that relates to the search term, your site will be ranked higher than your competitors. This is the same basic principle that has always been used. The changes have all related to how the search engines define relevancy. This most recent update in April of this year has increased the importance of social media links and decreased the importance of links from less traveled sites. The idea being that the more interaction you have with your fans, the more relevant your site is. It all makes sense to me and I’m steering all my clients to have at least one social media site where they post regularly and where they can build their fan base.

As always, if you have any questions or are not sure how this applies to your business, just respond to this post, give a call or send an email. I’ll try to clear up any questions you might have.